chapter 13 the “von braun paradigm” and nasa’s … · chapter 13 the “von braun paradigm”...

Chapter 13

The “Von Braun Paradigm” and NASA’s Long-Term Planning for Human SpaceflightMichael J. Neufeld

In 1994, political scientist and space historian Dwayne A. Day coined the

term “von Braun paradigm” to describe what he saw as an entrenched—and

counterproductive—NASA long-term strategy for human spaceflight.1 Roughly

speaking, he boiled that strategy down to: space shuttle → space station → Moon

→ Mars. Day was responding to the ignominious failure of President George H.

W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) from 1989 to 1990, which he, like

many others, blamed on the space agency’s penchant for gigantomania in its

human exploration program. In response to the presidential announcement on

the steps of NASM on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA’s 90-day study

group advocated building, on the foundation of the Shuttle and then-projected

space station, a lunar base and an ambitious spacefaring infrastructure that

within 20 or 30 years would lead to a permanent human foothold on Mars.

The cost turned out to be politically suicidal: several hundred billion dollars.

The 90-day study reprised the Space Task Group report of 1969, which was

an almost equally ignominious political failure. From that earlier proposal

for a grand (or grandiose) post-Apollo space program, NASA salvaged only a

scaled-back version of its first goal: a winged, reusable Space Shuttle.2

1. ©SmithsonianInstitution.PortionsofthispaperhavebeenexcerptedfromMichaelJ.Neufeld,“VonBraunandtheLunar-OrbitRendezvousDecision:FindingaWaytoGototheMoon,”Acta Astronautica63(2008):540–550,also©SmithsonianInstitution.

2. DwayneA.Day,“TheVonBraunParadigm,”Space Times (November–December1994):12–15;Dayexpanded that opinion piece in the AAS newsletter as “Paradigm Lost,” Space Policy 11 (1995):153–159.OnSEI,seeThorHogan,Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative(Washington,DC:NASASP-2007-4410,2007).

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NASA’s First 50 Years

Day traced this strategy back to the German-American rocket engineer

Wernher von Braun, of course, specifically the series of articles the space

visionary wrote or cowrote in Collier’s magazine between 1952 and 1954.

These laid out his grand vision, which Day argued “had its greatest influence

on how the U.S. space community envisions space. Von Braun convinced those

who worked in the field that space was worthy of a concentrated, integrated

human exploration effort.”3 In fact, his vision was controversial from the start,

drawing vigorous objections from many rocket engineers, but it was undeniably

influential over the long run, especially on spaceflight true believers inside

the movement and in the general public.4

Since Day coined that term, it has gained a certain currency in space his-

tory and policy. Particularly my esteemed NASM colleague, and former NASA

Chief Historian, Roger Launius, has both popularized and expanded the use

of the “von Braun paradigm” as an analytical term for describing a pattern

in American space development. In his book Space Stations, Roger increases

the list of von Braun’s essential stages to six, including preliminary ones of

robotic satellites and nonreusable piloted vehicles. But in the most recent

formulation, in his important book with Howard McCurdy, Robots in Space,

the two posit five stages as the core of von Braun’s thought: 1) “Development

of multi-stage rockets capable of placing satellites, animals and humans in

space; 2) “a large, winged, reusable spacecraft . . . to make space access rou-

tine”; 3) “a large, permanently occupied space station” for observing Earth

and launching “deep space expeditions”; 4) “human flights around the Moon,

leading to the first landings” and eventually to “permanent lunar bases”; and

5) assembling “spaceships in Earth orbit for the purpose of sending humans to

Mars and eventually colonizing that planet.” Launius and McCurdy also posit

the existence of an anti-von Braun, “Rosen/Eisenhower/Van Allen Alternative,”

for a more measured, and more robotic, space program.5

The primary aim of this paper will be to examine von Braun’s history

of space advocacy carefully, to see how much his ideas actually correspond

with the later construct of a von Braun paradigm. My secondary objective is

3. Day,“TheVonBraunParadigm,”p.12.Seealso“ParadigmLost,”p.154. 4. Onthecontroversy,seeesp.HowardMcCurdy,Space and the American Imagination (Washington,DC:

SmithsonianInstitutionPress,1997),chap.2. 5. RogerD.Launius,Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars(Washington,DC:SmithsonianInstitution

Press,2002),pp.26–27;LauniusandHowardE.McCurdy,Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel(Baltimore,MD:JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress,2008),pp.64–65(quotes)andchap.3(generally).

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The “Von Braun Paradigm” and NASA’s Long-Term Planning for Human Spaceflight

to look briefly at the history of later NASA human spaceflight planning to try

to discern von Braun’s influence or at least that of his so-called paradigm. My

conclusions are 1) that von Braun was not a systematic and consistent space

planner, but rather was often driven by enthusiasm and by a Moon obsession

that meant he was as interested in going straight to the lunar surface as using

the “logical” steps he laid out in Collier’s; 2) that although von Braun himself

may have been inconsistent, his public advocacy in the 1950s did tend to

consolidate a paradigm among space advocates focusing on the four main

elements of shuttle, station, Moon, and Mars; 3) that while there was always

opposition to his plans, the “Rosen/Eisenhower/Van Allen Alternative” is an

artificial construct that conflates different ideas from different times; 4) that

von Braun’s direct influence, still important in the 1960s, diminishes drastically

from the 1980s on; but 5) that the classic four-element von Braun paradigm

does seem to have been a shaping factor in NASA’s planning, from the 1969

Space Task Group to the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration. However, its influ-

ence was weakest in the latter case, and its persistence may in part by due to

other factors, notably the loss of Venus as a feasible destination and the lack

of interest (until the 1990s) in asteroids, which tended to foreclose other pos-

sible options for human deep space exploration besides the Moon or Mars.

Did von Braun Have a Paradigm?Von Braun’s career in space advocacy began when he was literally and figu-

ratively in the wilderness in the late 1940s. Relatively underemployed at Fort

Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas, when budget cuts forced the U.S. Army to reduce

its guided missile projects, including the ones he and his group of about

120 German and Austrian engineers were working on, von Braun sought an

outlet for his boundless creative energies. He decided that he needed to sell

the American people on spaceflight, so he set out to prove the feasibility of

a human expedition to Mars, based on conservative projections of late-1940s

technology. Showing how much he was ahead of almost everyone, he felt that

it was too easy to demonstrate a human Moon landing. But to make his Mars

study palatable to the general public, he concluded in 1947 that he had to

package it inside a science fiction novel.6

6. SeeMichaelJ.Neufeld,Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War(NewYork,NY:AlfredA.Knopf,2007),chaps.9–10, forelaboration;keysectionsonthenovelareexcerpted inMichaelJ.Neufeld,“‘SpaceSuperiority’:WernhervonBraun’sCampaignforaNuclear-ArmedSpaceStation,1946–1956,”Space Policy 22(2006):pp.52–62.

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By then, von Braun had been making informal plans and back-of-the-

envelope calculations for at least 15 years. Arthur Rudolph, later (in)famous

as the only member of von Braun’s group forced to leave the United States for

involvement with concentration camp labor, tells a story of staying up nights

at the Kummersdorf officer club in about 1935, calculating trajectories and

payloads for a Mars expedition. But von Braun’s central obsession was the

Moon, specifically leading an expedition to it himself—a dream that seized

him as teenager during the German spaceflight fad of the late 1920s. Several

anecdotes attest to his continuing fascination with a lunar landing throughout

the Nazi period; one or two even speak of a specific proposal, but we have

no details as to whether he was speaking of a direct launch from Earth or an

assembly in Earth orbit near his space station, another major obsession. He

may have contemplated both. Brief comments he made to the press and the

public in El Paso, Texas, in winter 1946–47, however, described the station as

a “refueling” stop on the way to the Moon.7

His plans for a large, rotating, wheel-type space station appear to have

developed in parallel to his Moon and Mars ideas. A major influence were the

writings of his hero, the German-Rumanian spaceflight theoretician Hermann

Oberth, but the wheel format seems likely to have come from the 1929 book

by the Slovenian-Austrian Hermann Noordung (pseudonym for Potoçnik),

although von Braun never acknowledged the influence. From Oberth, von

Braun definitely drew his ideas of the station as a superweapon for observ-

ing and dominating Earth. Following the revelation of the atomic bomb and

his arrival in the United States, he reconceived it as a battle station control-

ling co-orbiting nuclear missiles; he became convinced that he had the key

to defeating the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War. His ill-fated science

fiction novel, originally titled Mars Project: A Technical Tale, has a fascinating

7. ArthurRudolphOHIbyMichaelJ.Neufeld,4August1989,NASMArchives;DanielLang,“ARomanticUrge,”inFrom Hiroshima to the Moon(NewYork,NY:Simon&Schuster,1959),pp.191–192,originallypublished inNew Yorker21 (April1951):75;PeterWegener,The Peenemünde Wind Tunnels (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 41–42; Hans Kehrl, Krisenmanager im Dritten Reich(Düsseldorf:Droste,1973),p.336;Jak.vandenDrieschtoWernhervonBraun,6January1969,inU.S.SpaceandRocketCenter(USSRC),vonBraunPapers,file423-4;WernhervonBraun,“SurveyofDevelopmentofLiquidRocketsinGermanyandTheirFutureProspects,”inReport on Certain Phases of War Research,byFritzZwicky(Pasadena,CA:Aerojet,1945),pp.66–72;“GermanScientistsPlanRe-fuelingStationinSkyonRoutetoMoon,”El Paso Times (4December1946),copyinNASAKSCarchives,Debus collection;Wernher vonBraun (RotaryClub speech, 16 January 1947), inUSSRC,Huntsville,AL,WernhervonBraunPapers,file101-3.FormoreonthehistoryofvonBraun’sMoonplans,seeNeufeld,“VonBraunandtheLunar-OrbitRendezvousDecision.”

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and disturbing opening, “A.D. 1980.” It is set after the USSR is destroyed by

nuclear strikes from his space station, “Lunetta,” a name he treasured from a

science fiction story he wrote as a teenage boy. In his early 1950s writings, he

discussed using preemptive atomic attacks to protect the station—making the

speculation that he was later a model for Dr. Strangelove seem not unjustified!8

In order for his station to be useful as a reconnaissance and bombing

platform against the Soviets, it had to be in a polar or near-polar orbit, which

he set at a 2-hour period at 1,075 miles (later shown to be infeasible when

the radiation belts were discovered). This orbit was in the wrong plane for

his Mars expedition, which needed to depart in the ecliptic plane of the solar

system so as to minimize the energy needed to reach the Red Planet. Thus, in

the novel, his gigantic fleet of 10 spaceships, each with a mass of 8.2 million

pounds and carrying seven men (and only men) apiece, was not assembled

next to the station. Temporary living quarters for the work crews were set up

inside the Mars ships instead. He thus believed a station was not essential to

launching a human Mars expedition, but he took it for granted that it would

come first as mankind’s initial foothold beyond Earth.9

To orbit 82 million pounds of hardware and propellants (mostly the latter)

required a huge logistics operation he developed at length. In the novel, he

alludes to an earlier class of “Jupiter” multistage boosters, but for Mars, the

“United States of Earth” develops the “Sirius” class, a huge three-stage rocket

much squatter and heavier than the later Saturn V. The first and second stages

are recovered at sea and reused. The third is the winged rocket freighter that

delivers materials and people into orbit. The assumption that humans would

fly in craft with wings was not original to him, of course, as space advocates

like the Austrians Max Valier and Eugen Sänger had already argued that the

transition was most natural from an atmospheric rocket plane to what we

8. Neufeld,“‘SpaceSuperiority’”;WernhervonBraun,“Survey...,”inReport on Certain Phases of War Research in Germany,byFritzZwicky(Pasadena,CA:Aerojet,1945),pp.66–72;WernhervonBraun,“QuestionsandAnswersonA-9,A-10andA-11,”July1946,inNationalArchives,CollegePark,MD,RG156,E.1039A,file“Ch.IINewMaterial—RevisionMaterial,”box79;“GiantDoughnutisProposedasSpaceStation,”Popular Science(October1951):120–121;WernhervonBraun,“CrossingtheLastFrontier,”Collier’s (22March1952):24–28,72–73,andtheaccompanyingmagazineeditorialonp.23,“WhatAreWeWaitingFor?”;WernhervonBraun“SpaceSuperiority,”Ordnance(March–April1953):770–775.

9. Theoriginal“MarsProject”typescriptsareinUSSRC,WernhervonBraunPapers,file204-7(German),205-1(English);thefailednovelwasrecentlypublishedasProject Mars: A Technical Tale(Burlington,ON:ApogeeBooksScienceFiction,2006);whatoriginallyappearedinprintwashisrevisedmathematicalappendix,WernhervonBraun,Das Marsprojekt(Frankfurt,Germany:Umschau,1952),andThe Mars Project(Urbana,IL:UniversityofIllinoisPress,1953).

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would now call a space shuttle. To von Braun, wings were needed above all

for reentry, as no one had yet conceived of an ablative heat shield for a bal-

listic return. He pictured a glide halfway around Earth and put active cooling

in the wings and nose to prevent them from melting. Of course, landing on

a runway also made believable the airlinelike operations needed to fire two

giant boosters per day and accomplish 950 launches in eight months! Complete

reusability and the essential economies it provided were critical to all of von

Braun’s early spaceflight conceptions, even more critical than a station. It

was the only way he could justify the economic feasibility of his monumental

space infrastructure.10

As is well known, von Braun’s often woodenly written novel was rejected

by something like 18 publishers, but his revised mathematical appendix did

appear in German in 1952 and in English in 1953 as The Mars Project. By that

time, he had made his great breakthrough in the Collier’s magazine series,

together with several other authors, notably his friend Willy Ley. The first issue,

on 22 March 1952, and the first book that came out of the series, Across the

Space Frontier, introduced the public to aesthetically improved versions of his

booster and station as redrawn by artists Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman, and

Rolf Klep. The magazine endorsed von Braun’s militant Cold War argument for

using the space station to establish “space superiority” over the Soviet Union.

In two more issues in October 1952, and in the spinoff book, Conquest of the

Moon, von Braun presented his conception of the first lunar expedition, which

involved three ships and 50 men and took six months to assemble in the space

station’s polar orbit. He reveled in imagining huge space voyages, but he was

far from committed to it as the only strategy, as he earlier and later discussed

small, direct expeditions to the Moon.11 The popularity of the space issues caused Collier’s and its series editor,

Cornelius Ryan, to put off the projected Mars number and ask von Braun

and some of the other collaborators to generate articles on the training and

preparation of “space men” (the word “astronaut” was not then used for that

10. WernhervonBraun,Project Mars,pp.23,113–120,215–31;WernhervonBraun,The Mars Project,pp.9–36.

11. Neufeld, Von Braun, pp. 246–247, 251–269; Neufeld, “‘Space Superiority’”; Wernher von Braun,“CrossingtheLastFrontier,”Collier’s (22March1952):24–28;WernhervonBraun,“ManontheMoon:TheJourney,”Collier’s (18October1952):24–28,51–58,60,72–73;WernhervonBraun(withFredL.Whipple),“Manon theMoon:TheExploration,”Collier’s (25October1952): 38–40,42,44–48;CorneliusRyan,ed.,Across the Space Frontier (NewYork,NY:Viking,1952)andConquest of the Moon(NewYork,NY:Viking,1953).OnvonBraun’sotherMoonplans,seeNeufeld,“VonBraunandtheLunar-OrbitRendezvousDecision,”andfootnote6inthischapter.

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Figure 1: VonBraunin1955againstthebackdropofafamousChesleyBonestellpaintingfromthefirstCollier’sspaceissueof1952.HeisholdingamodeloftheDisneyversionofhiswingedspaceshuttle.U.S. Army photo courtesy of NASM

purpose). In the spring of 1953, Ryan also asked von Braun to speculate on

space exploration before humans went up. Von Braun produced an article on a

biological satellite he called the “baby space station,” in which several monkeys

would spend two months in weightlessness before being euthanized prior to

satellite burnup. Even the three-stage expendable booster he proposed for this

mission was 150 feet high and 30 feet in diameter at the base.12 Prior to this

time, he had taken little interest in the preliminary stages of space exploration

and thought not at all about robotic spaceflight. His Mars expedition is the first

mission of any kind to the Red Planet. He had little faith that spacecraft would

work without humans on board to fix them, and he was simply uninterested

in any other form of exploration. For him, as for other space advocates of his

generation, sending humans was the point.

12. WernhervonBraun(withCorneliusRyan),“BabySpaceStation,”Collier’s (27June1953):33–35,38,40;Neufeld,Von Braun,pp.272–273.

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Yet, at almost the same time, von Braun conceived in the classified world

an absolute “minimum” satellite booster and craft, dubbed “Orbiter” in late

1954, using his new Redstone ballistic missile as the first stage. The satellite

in its initial version would have been only a 5-pound inert ball or balloon.13

Writing von Braun’s biography, I was struck by the apparent contradiction in

his character: on the one hand he reveled in gigantism when he conceived of

the space future, and on the other he was a very conservative rocket engineer.

He and his Army group were not on the cutting edge of missile propulsion or

structures in the 1950s because of that engineering conservatism. He had two

sides: a vivid imagination that led him into romanticism and a deep-seated

pragmatism that shaded into naked opportunism; but he did not see it as a

contradiction, as he expected that small, practical steps in the near term would

lead quickly to the glorious future he imagined.

The Collier’s series ended in April 1954 with the much-delayed Mars issue.

By then von Braun was already moving beyond his original Mars Project con-

ceptions. He had come under attack from his colleagues in the American Rocket

Society for gigantomania, and his associate Ernst Stuhlinger was studying ion

propulsion for interplanetary voyages. But his busy schedule meant that he

did not want to rethink his 10-ship expedition in 1954. When von Braun, Ley,

and Bonestell’s book version, The Conquest of Mars, was finally published two

years later, however, he cut the expedition back to two ships, in response to

criticism, but stuck with chemical propulsion.14

In the interim, the Walt Disney Company had become interested in space-

flight for its new television series and hired von Braun and Ley to be its con-

sultants and on-screen spokesmen, along with an ex-German space medicine

expert. Disney presented to a television audience of millions between 1955

and 1957 yet another version of von Braun’s vision: giant booster with winged

spacecraft, orbiting wheel station, Moon exploration (a preliminary circumlunar

voyage in this case), and a Mars expedition (using Stuhlinger’s solar-powered,

ion-engine ships). It is fair to say that Disney helped solidify a “von Braun

paradigm” of four main elements (shuttle, station, Moon, Mars) in the minds

13. MichaelJ.Neufeld,“Orbiter,OverflightandtheFirstSatellite:NewLightontheVanguardDecision,”inReconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite,ed.RogerD.Launius,JohnM.Logsdon,andRobertW.Smith(Amsterdam,Netherlands:HarwoodAcademicPublishers,2000),pp.231–257.

14. WernhervonBraun(withCorneliusRyan),“CanWeGettoMars?,”Collier’s (30April1954):22–29;WillyLey,WernhervonBraun,andChesleyBonestell,The Exploration of Mars (NewYork,NY:Viking,1956);Neufeld,Von Braun,pp.270–272,275–277,286;TomD.Crouch,Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers(Reston,VA:AIAA,2006),pp.134–137.

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of the public, which was now more likely to believe that spaceflight would

soon become a reality.15

One interesting lacuna no one ever talks about is the virtual absence of

Venus in the Collier’s-Disney popularizations of von Braun et al. Here was a

planet almost exactly the same size as Earth and actually slightly closer and

more accessible than Mars, and one also the frequent subject of science fiction,

both written and filmed. Science fiction movies (mostly bad) about landing

on Venus continued to be made into the 1960s. One popular speculation was

that there must be a steamy swamp world under the impenetrable blanket of

clouds, as the planet was closer to the Sun. It was not until Mariner 2’s flyby

in December 1962 that we knew for certain that the beautiful evening and

morning star was actually a hellish world with temperatures hot enough to

melt lead. The causes of this neglect by von Braun and his compatriots are not

far to seek: the Western cultural obsession with Mars that had flourished since

telescopes improved our view in the late 19th century, showing an apparently

Earth-like planet with probable life, as opposed to the blank white mystery of

Venus. Von Braun’s Mars Project novel featured an updated version of Percival

Lowell’s Red Planet with canals designed by an older, superior civilization to

move water from the polar caps to its cities. It is unclear how much he still

believed in a Lowellian Mars in the 1950s, but he clearly had become deeply

fascinated by the idea in his youth and never completely lost it thereafter.16

Shortly before the first broadcast of the last Disney program in December

1957, the program about Mars, the Soviets launched two Sputniks. Von Braun

immediately proposed a crash project that bore no resemblance to the winged

vehicle he had recently depicted as the necessary first step in human space

travel. To launch a man (I use the term advisedly) as soon as possible, he argued

for using a Redstone to lob a fairly primitive capsule on a brief suborbital

flight. Called “Man Very High” and then “Project Adam” (for “first man”), this

idea was famously dismissed by NACA Director Hugh Dryden in the spring of

1958 as having “about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shoot-

15. Neufeld,Von Braun,pp.284–290,andfortheimpactofCollier’sandDisneyonthepublic,seeesp.McCurdy’sseminalSpace and the American Imagination.

16. RobertMarkley,Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination(Durham,NC/London,U.K.:DukeUniversityPress,2005),esp.pp.2–3,21–22;WernhervonBraun,Project Mars;Neufeld,Von Braun,pp.28–29;LauniusandMcCurdy,Robots,pp.66,271n11.IhavefoundasinglereferencetoVenusintheCollier’sseries, inaWernhervonBraunanswertoaquestionina“SpaceQuiz”ofmiscellaneousinformationputtogetherbytheeditors,Collier’s(22March1952):38.HestatesthataspacestationwouldhavetobebuiltaroundVenusbeforehumanscouldlandthere.

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ing the young lady from the gun.” But the idea quickly reappeared, albeit as

part of a technically more sophisticated NASA program, Mercury, for putting

a man into orbit.17

Soon thereafter, von Braun outlined a direct trip to the Moon in a popular

magazine. His fame magnified by his central role in launching the first American

satellite, he was finally able to realize his frustrated ambitions as a science

fiction writer. In the fall of 1958 and spring of 1959, the Sunday newspaper

supplement This Week published his novella, First Men to the Moon, in four parts,

detailing a two-man expedition to that body using a huge rocket and a direct

launch from Earth. Turning around as it approached the Moon, his spacecraft

ignited a landing stage to alight on the lunar surface without going into orbit;

that stage provided the launch platform for the two astronauts in their winged

reentry vehicle to propel themselves back to Earth. It seems likely that this

concept went back to some of his original German ideas, as one anecdote of

the Nazi period indicates he was thinking of a two-man expedition. The story

was skillfully illustrated by one of his Collier’s collaborators, Fred Freeman.

Padded with popular science material on spaceflight, it appeared as a short

book in 1960. That same year, the magazine published a modified excerpt

from his failed Mars novel, depicting the encounter between his adventurers

and the inhabitants of the Red Planet.18

At almost exactly the same time as First Men to the Moon was first pub-

lished, from 1958 to 1959, von Braun and his Army associates developed

their first detailed lunar exploration plans. The context was the red-hot space

race, interservice rivalry with the U.S. Air Force, and a search for missions

for their new Saturn launch vehicle, then going into development. It would

combine eight engines in the first stage for an unprecedented 1.5 million

pounds (6.67 million newtons) of thrust. Lacking the authority to develop

the gigantic launcher needed for direct ascent, which NASA would soon call

Nova, and needing to justify Saturn, von Braun and his advanced missions

people, Ernst Stuhlinger and H. H. Koelle, favored assembling and fuel-

ing the lunar landing vehicle in orbit around the home planet using many

launches. This was the conservative approach that von Braun advocated to

NASA at the end of 1958 when trying to sell Saturn, and it came up again

17. DrydenquotedinNeufeld,Von Braun,p.329. 18. “FirstMen”corr. inUSSRC,WernhervonBraunPapers,file200-31;WernhervonBraun,First Men

to the Moon(NewYork,NY:Holt,RinehartandWinston,1960);KlausH.Scheufelen,Mythos Raketen: Chancen für den Frieden. Erinnerungen (Esslingen,Germany:Bechtle,2004),pp.82–83.

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in Project Horizon, an Army lunar base study carried out in 1959. These

studies helped shape NASA’s long-range plan of that year, which rated an

accelerated human circumlunar voyage as a goal at least as important as an

Earth-orbital station. It was the first step on the road to a rush trip to the

lunar surface to beat the Soviets. Von Braun, as a lifelong Moon obsessive,

was thrilled at the possibility, and even more so after Kennedy made it real

in 1961. He was quite willing to postpone the shuttle and station until later.

He was, as we have seen, a romantic not rigidly committed to the plans laid

out in Collier’s and Disney.19

With the completion of his group’s transfer to NASA in July 1960, von

Braun’s days as a visionary were essentially over. He spent the next decade

as the Director of MSFC and as chief salesman for the Agency’s programs,

primarily Apollo-Saturn. While he made suggestions for, and critiqued, many

NASA-funded studies of space stations and lunar and planetary exploration,

the ideas were no longer really his. His influence stemmed largely from

the impact of Collier’s and Disney on a generation of rocket engineers and

space enthusiasts. I will explore further the impact of his ideas on NASA

planning below.

Thus I agree with Day and Launius; there was indeed a von Braun para-

digm that was a product of his popular activities in those two media outlets

in the 1950s, and I agree with Day that it consisted of only four fundamental

elements. The addition of one or two preliminary stages does not correspond

to von Braun’s very limited public discussion of the early phases of space-

flight in public (consisting essentially of one solicited article on the “baby

space station”), nor to his disinterest in robotic probes and his obsession

with monumental human exploration. I might add that he was not rigid

either in describing the relationship between the stages, especially in the

case of the space station, which did not always have to serve as a base for

launching lunar and planetary expeditions and did not necessarily have to

come before going to the Moon.

In short, one must distinguish between von Braun and the von Braun

paradigm, as there were several von Brauns. One was the pragmatic and

19. CourtneyG.Brooks,JamesM.Grimwood,andLoydS.Swenson,Jr.,Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft (Washington,DC:NASASP-4205,1979),pp.4–6;FrederickI.OrdwayIII,MitchellR.Sharpe,andRonaldC.Wakeford,“ProjectHorizon:AnEarlyStudyofaLunarOutpost,”Acta Astronautica 17(1988):1105–1121;NASA,“TheLongRangePlanoftheNationalAeronauticsandSpaceAdministration”inExploring the Unknown,ed.JohnM.Logsdon,vol.1,Organizing for Exploration (Washington,DC:NASASP-4407,1995),pp.377–378(introduction),403–407(document).

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conservative engineering manager who had a burning desire to accomplish

something right now (especially if he could put his name on it) and proposed

short-term, “quick fix” programs like Orbiter and Adam. Another was the

Moon obsessive fascinated by traveling there, if possible personally, with the

result that he privately worked out what it would take to make a direct trip as

early as the 1930s. It led him, I think, into a Faustian bargain with the Nazis.

What of Launius and McCurdy’s “Rosen/Eisenhower/Van Allen Alternative”?20

As indicated earlier, I do not believe it is a useful analytical device. It con-

flates criticism of von Braun, the von Braun paradigm, and large-scale human

spaceflight made at different times for different reasons. I will take the three

named protagonists in turn.

Milton Rosen served as chief engineer for NRL’s Viking and Vanguard pro-

grams and made himself famous in October 1952 for debating von Braun at

the Hayden Planetarium in New York. At issue was von Braun’s March Collier’s

proposals for a giant booster and nuclear-armed battle station. Rosen expressed

a widespread feeling among engineers in the American Rocket Society, who

thought that the German’s grandiose plans were infeasible and would prove

a massive distraction from urgent guided-missile work; indeed, von Braun’s

plans were a threat to national security. Rosen and his American Rocket Society

compatriots were in part misled by von Braun’s, and the magazine’s, disinterest

in describing the preliminary stages of spaceflight and by von Braun’s willing-

ness to paint a grand picture to sell the public on space, even as he acted in

his day job as a rocket engineer every bit as conservative as they were. After

Sputnik, Rosen would become as caught up in the space race as anyone else.

He advocated building the gigantic Nova launch vehicle for a “direct ascent”

mission to land on the Moon, even after von Braun and other NASA engineers

had already switched to Earth-orbit or lunar-orbit rendezvous as the way to go

during Apollo. So he will hardly serve as the leading name in a united front

of anti-human-spaceflight advocates.21

President Dwight Eisenhower’s secret motives in establishing the first

scientific satellite project as a stalking horse for a reconnaissance satellite are

now well known, as is his public, post-Sputnik attempt to contain the growth

rate of space spending. Motivated by traditional fiscal conservatism, he was

worried that human spaceflight programs would grow so large as to add mas-

20. LauniusandMcCurdy,Robots,pp.64–70. 21. Rosen OHI by Michael J. Neufeld, 24 July 1998, NASM Archives; “Journey into Space,” Time (8

December1952):62–64,67–70,73;Crouch,Rocketeers,pp.134–137.

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sively to a national debt already ballooned by the Cold War and nuclear arms

race. He was often exasperated by the now German-American’s penchant

for loud public speaking on behalf of such programs. Eisenhower’s vision

for NASA, as Launius, McCurdy, and others have detailed, was of an Agency

with a billion-dollar-a-year budget focusing mostly on robotic spacecraft for

applications and exploration. It was a vision quickly overthrown by Kennedy

and Johnson, who quintupled NASA’s budget.22

James Van Allen was an Iowa physicist forever linked to von Braun by

the iconic picture of the three holding up a replica of Explorer I on the night

the first United States satellite was launched (the third was the Director of

JPL, William Pickering). Several months later, he became even more famous

as the discoverer of the radiation belts because of his Explorer experiment.

His opposition to expensive human spaceflight programs grew up as a result

of Apollo and the perceived lack of meaningful science return for the money

expended, as opposed to the output of robotic exploration of Earth’s cosmic

environment and deep space. He became the most vocal spokesman, mostly

from the 1970s on, for the skepticism about human spaceflight in the scientific

community, an attitude still common there today. Van Allen’s vision of NASA’s

ideal program thus bears resemblance to Eisenhower’s, but his motivation

was rather different.23

In sum, there has been opposition to von Braun’s ideas, the von Braun

paradigm, and large-scale human spaceflight from the beginning until now, but

it is more differentiated and complex than is easily encapsulated in a single

“alternative.” It bears some resemblance to the more complex reality of von

Braun and his paradigm, which I have outlined above, and deserves further

study. But I will turn my attention back to the last part of my examination of

the paradigm thesis, that of its apparent influence on later planning.

22. WalterA.McDougall,...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (NewYork,NY:BasicBooks,1985);DavidCallahanandFredI.Greenstein,“TheReluctantRacer:EisenhowerandU.S.SpacePolicy,”inSpaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership,ed.RogerD.LauniusandHowardE.McCurdy(Urbana/Chicago,IL:UniversityofIllinoisPress,1997),chap.1.

23. Abigail Foerstner, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (Iowa City, IA: Iowa UniversityPress,2007),pp.250–257.Onp.66ofRobots,LauniusandMcCurdyspeakofEisenhoweradoptingthe“Rosen-VanAllenpointofview.”IdoubtthereisanyevidencethathepaidattentiontoRosen’sideasasreportedinTimebackin1952,andVanAllenhadnotstartedcampaigningyetatthetimeofEisenhower’sdecision-makingonspace,from1955to1960.TheonlyVanAllenreferencestheygiveintheendnotesonp.271datetothe1980s.Eisenhower’sscientificadvisers,notablyGeorgeKistiakowsky and James Killian, were likely the sources of his arguments for the superiority ofscientificsatellites.

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The Von Braun Paradigm and Long-Term NASA PlanningMy analysis of this topic will be briefer, primarily because I have not done the

depth of research equivalent to my work on von Braun. The topic is large and

sprawling, covering as it does nearly a half century of NASA plans; I will leave

detailed examination to others. My primary purpose is to try to test the other

part of Day’s original thesis, as extended and amplified by Launius and McCurdy,

namely, that the von Braun paradigm has exercised a profound influence on

NASA’s vision for human spaceflight after Apollo, pushing the Agency to build

large, expensive programs focusing on the four main objectives: shuttle, sta-

tion, Moon, and Mars. There have been three milestone events, the Space Task

Group (STG) of 1969, the SEI of 1989, and the Vision for Space Exploration of

2004, the first two of which motivated Day’s thesis. There have also been less

visible proposals and studies, notably two not long before the SEI: the 1986

National Commission on Space and the 1987 Ride Report, neither of which fit

neatly the paradigm thesis.

The first of these three major events, the STG, can be interpreted as an

attempt to return to the script of the von Braun paradigm after the Moon

landing, and it was the only one on which von Braun exercised any direct

influence. Shortly after President Richard Nixon’s inauguration, which came

only weeks after the spectacular circumlunar voyage of Apollo 8, he asked

Vice President Spiro Agnew to produce a proposal for a post-Apollo NASA

program. The STG’s direction and content were largely driven by Administrator

Thomas Paine, who had a strong ally in the Vice President, a former Maryland

governor with zero space expertise. Paine, an engineer who fondly remem-

bered the Collier’s-Disney series and was a fan of von Braun, was determined

to exploit the Apollo success to get the maximum program he could out of

the political system, which he pictured in classic paradigm fashion as a large

human spaceflight program culminating in a Mars landing. When the Associate

Administrator for Manned Spaceflight, George Mueller, produced an “integrated

program plan” that spring for a shuttle, station, and cislunar nuclear shuttle

to support continuing Moon exploration, Paine asked von Braun’s Center to

add a Mars expedition using those elements.24

The MSFC Director gave a famous viewgraph presentation to the STG and

to a Senate committee in early August 1969, just two weeks after Apollo 11. It

24. PaineOHIbyLogsdon,12Augustand3September1970,file4185,NASAHistoryDivision;DavidS.F.Portree,Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000(Washington,DC:NASASP-2001-4521,2001),pp.47–48;Heppenheimer,Space Shuttle Decision,pp.159–174.

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Figure 2: PresidentRichardNixonannouncesNASAActingAdministratorThomasPaine’snominationasAdministratoron5March1969.VicePresidentSpiroAgnewisontheright.AgnewandPainewouldpushanambitiousshuttle-station-Moon-Marsstrategyforthepost-ApollospaceprogramthatNixonrefusedtosupport.NASA Image 69-H-225

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audaciously gave an exact date in November 1981 for the departure of such an

expedition from Earth orbit. He did so, I believe, in spite of harboring doubts

about Paine’s risky strategy. Before the Administrator’s request, he had not

pushed a human Mars program, knowing that public opinion was unlikely

to support it. A year later, no doubt influenced by hindsight, he told political

scientist John Logsdon: “I have never in the last two or three years strongly

promoted a manned Mars project . . . . People . . . have tried to cast me in the

image . . . of the Mars or bust guy in this agency, which I am definitely not.” A

little earlier in the interview, he said: “I, for one, have always felt that it would

be a good idea to read the signs of the times and respond to what the country

really wants, rather than trying to cram a bill of goodies down somebody’s

throat for which the time is not ripe or ready.”25

Like many in NASA’s human spaceflight establishment, he thought a space

station more salable and was committed to it as necessary infrastructure. A

winged shuttle, an idea strongly pushed by Mueller in the late 1960s, von

Braun and his counterparts conceived largely as a station adjunct, a logistics

vehicle needed to transfer crew and cargo (the station components themselves

would be launched on a Saturn V or other heavy-lift vehicle). With the almost

instantaneous failure of Paine and von Braun’s Mars initiative in the summer of

1969, followed by the slow death of the fall STG report, which laid out shuttle-

station-Moon-Mars proposals differing only in timetable, it was the station

and shuttle agenda NASA returned to. But the station’s purpose was unclear

to the politicians and gained no traction with the public. In the end, only the

Space Shuttle, oversold as a vehicle that would revolutionize the economics of

spaceflight, was politically feasible in the brutal post-Apollo budgetary envi-

ronment. As the other elements of a big human program faded into a vague

and distant future, the Shuttle became for a decade an end in itself—not so

much a space policy as an excuse not to have one.26

None of what transpired in the STG and its aftermath obviously conflicts

with the von Braun paradigm thesis. The NASA human spaceflight establish-

25. WernhervonBraunOHIbyLogsdon,25August1970,file2629,NASAHistoryDivision. 26. JoanHoff,“ThePresidency,Congress,andtheDecelerationoftheU.S.SpacePrograminthe1970s,”

inSpaceflight, ed. Launius andMcCurdy, pp.98–100,103–104;STG report, September1969, inExploring the Unknown,ed.Logsdon,vol.1,Organizing for Exploration,pp.522–543.TheSTGreportcoversactuallyamuchlargerspectrumofspacepolicy, includingspacescienceandmilitaryspaceprojects,sothecentralityofthevonBraunparadigmisnotsoeasilyvisiblethere.YettheemphasisplacedonabighumanprogramleadingtoMarsisclearintheemphasisPaineputonitthatsummerof1969.

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ment seems to have accepted the centrality of the four basic elements (the

scientific and robotic spacecraft communities were another matter). If I have

any second thoughts about the thesis as it applies to this episode, it is that

the solar system itself seemed to foreclose other options for near-term human

exploration, at least within the framework of discussion before 1975. With

the 1962 confirmation that Venus was uninhabitable, there was apparently no

place else to go after the Moon. There had been discussion of human flybys

of Venus in the 1960s, but only because certain Mars trajectories required a

gravity-assist from the second planet in one direction or the other. As robotic

missions to the planets succeeded, the scientific return of human planetary

flybys seemed scarcely credible for the expense anyway. Human spaceflight

advocates were still fixated on the colonization of planetary surfaces, based

on the analogy of the voyages of world exploration, and in the United States,

especially, of the western frontier. But it would be hard to attribute that

exploration and colonization focus primarily to von Braun or the paradigm,

as it was embedded in the assumptions of the space travel movement since

its origins. Similarly, the winged Space Shuttle had a long prehistory in space

advocacy based on the analogy of aeronautics. So if the von Braun paradigm

has any analytical meaning, it has to be in the centrality of the four elements,

probably in the usual order, but not necessarily rigidly linked to each other.27

In the 1970s and 1980s, however, other options for human exploration

of the inner solar system appeared. Gerard O’Neill popularized the idea of

huge space colonies at the libration points of the Earth-Moon system, based

on mining of the Moon and building solar-powered satellites for Earth. Robert

Farquhar demonstrated, with the robotic spacecraft ISEE-3, the feasibility of

libration-point halo orbits and the possibilities of exotic trajectories when he

used lunar swingbys to send it to a comet. The growing concern in the 1980s

and after about the threat of asteroid and comet impacts focused attention on

those possible targets for human missions.

This changing context had a visible impact on the 1986 National Commission

on Space, led by ex-Administrator Paine, which attempted to produce a new

space policy for the Reagan administration. In its ill-timed report, which

appeared just after the Shuttle Challenger accident, Paine’s group once again

painted a vision of a massive human spaceflight program. Paine even inserted

a visual salute to von Braun as the frontispiece: a reproduction of the classic

27. Portree,Humans,pp.20,26,32,37;McCurdy,Space and the American Imagination,chap.6; LauniusandMcCurdy,Robots,pp.55–61.

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Figure 3:On20July1989,atNASM,PresidentGeorgeH.W.BushannouncestheSEI,anewattempttoimplementthevonBraunparadigm.AmongthosepresentweretheApollo11crew,VicePresidentDanQuayle,andNASAAdministratorRichardTruly. NASA Image 89-H-380

Bonestell painting of the shuttle, station, and space telescope from Collier’s,

paired with a modern version of the same trio painted by Robert McCall. But

as O’Neill was a member of the National Commission on Space, the report also

broke somewhat with the paradigm in discussing space colonies and libration-

point missions. That only added to its flavor of impractical utopianism, and it

was quickly dismissed in Washington. NASA instead commissioned astronaut

Sally Ride to produce a report. Her group also strayed somewhat from the

paradigm in 1987 by proposing a robotic “Mission to Planet Earth” as one focus

and discussing an option of going straight to human Mars missions without

necessarily going back to the Moon, although a lunar base was also an option.28

So why did the classic von Braun paradigm apparently reappear only two

years later in George H. W. Bush’s SEI and the 90-day study NASA produced

in response to it? Part of the reason was that in the meantime, NASA had sold

28. UnitedStatesNationalCommissiononSpace,Pioneering the Space Frontier: The Report of the National Commission on Space (NewYork,NY: BantamBooks, 1986); Portree,Humans, pp. 67–75;Hogan,Mars Wars,pp.27–32.

342


the Space Station to President Reagan from 1983 to 1984 at the apogee of early

Shuttle optimism. The Station decision might be interpreted as another return

to the traditional script, as one of its missions would be to support later lunar

and planetary exploration. When President Bush cast about for an ambitious

new space policy in 1989, NASA engineers and managers from the human

spaceflight side were the primary influences on the staff of the new NSC, which

was headed by his Vice President, Dan Quayle. Bush’s SEI speech singled out

the Station, Moon bases, and Mars outposts explicitly, linking them together as

stepping-stones, letting Agency engineers and space planners off the hook for

even bothering to think about another strategy. It should be added that if a big

human program was viewed as foundational, the lack of other targets—or at

least the ability to imagine other targets—remained fundamental. By the end

of the 1980s, the fad for O’Neill’s space colonies had faded as their utopian

character became clear; they would have to follow extensive lunar colonization

anyway. The asteroid and comet impact issue had not yet risen to the level

of public interest it would in the 1990s, when it resulted in two Hollywood

movies. So an entrenched mindset at NASA that might be described as the von

Braun paradigm appears central to SEI and its rapid failure, reinforced again

by the apparent lack of any other place to go with humans.29 In contrast to the Space Task Group, however, von Braun (who had died

in 1977) was essentially invisible in this episode. Bush did not mention him,

nor did anyone in the Agency invoke his name much.30 Since it is difficult to

prove a negative—why von Braun’s name was absent—I can do little but offer

speculative explanations. Primarily, I think, he already was a figure from the

distant past by 1989, as his last substantive ideas were formulated three decades

earlier. The growing controversy about his Nazi past in the late 1980s might

also have made his name somewhat “politically incorrect,” at least outside his

hometown of 20 years, Huntsville, Alabama, where even now denial is the

order of the day. Following the October 1984 revelation that Arthur Rudolph

had voluntarily left the United States and renounced his citizenship to avoid a

29. Hogan,Mars Wars, chaps.3–5;Portree,Humans to Mars, chap.9; copyofBush speech,20July1989, file 9008, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Division, NASA Headquarters,Washington,DC.

30. The study NASA did in response to the Bush speech does mention von Braun’s name once as aprecursorinplanning,attributingtohimthe1969plan;see“Reportofthe90-DayStudy...,”November1989,page2-1,inNASAHistoryDivision,file17922,andtheviewgraphsummarybyMarkCraig,18January1990,infile9007.Similarly,vonBraungetsasinglementionunder“MissionScenarios”inanearlierNASAbriefingforNSCandOMBstaff:FranklinMartin,“ExplorationBackgroundBriefing...,”25August1989,file17923.

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Figure 4: PresidentGeorgeW.BushspeaksatNASAHeadquarterson14January2004ontheVisionforSpaceExploration.ItwoulddepartfromtheclassicvonBraunparadigm,notablyinendingtheSpaceShuttleProgramandmarginalizingtheSpaceStation.White House Official Photo P-37074-33

denaturalization hearing over his involvement with concentration camp labor,

newspapers around the world ran major stories. Subsequently, investigative

journalists dug up a lot of dirt on the Third Reich records of von Braun and

his key associates. Always a problematic hero, he posthumously became a

touchy problem for NASA.31

The failure of the SEI put NASA long-term human spaceflight planning

once again on the back burner. Faced with the unpopularity of more ambi-

tious objectives, Agency leaders circled the wagons around Space Station

31. Themostimportantpre-1989publicationsontheNaziissuewereLindaHunt,“U.S.CoverupofNaziScientists,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 1985): 16–24, and Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany (London, U.K.: Michael Joseph,1987).HuntappearedonCNNpursuingvonBraunteammembersintheirHuntsvilledriveways,andBowerhadamajorspecialon thePBS-TVprogramFrontline inearly1988.OnvonBraun’srecordinparticular, seeMichael J.Neufeld,“Wernher vonBraun, theSS,andConcentrationCampLabor:QuestionsofMoral,Political,andCriminalResponsibility,”German Studies Review25(2002):57–78.MoniqueLaneyisstudyingthehistoryoftheGermansinthecityanditsconnectiontothememoryoftheNazirocketprogram;see“‘OperationPaperclip’inHuntsville,Alabama,”inRemembering the Space Age,ed.StevenJ.Dick (Washington,DC:NASASP-2008-4703,2008).

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Freedom, as it was then called, to protect NASA’s budget and human spaceflight

establishment. New planning began only at the end of the 1990s, late in the

term of Administrator Daniel Goldin. In the meantime, Red Planet enthusiasts

like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society had popularized an alternative they

called “Mars Direct”—rejecting the Moon as a way station and emphasizing

the exploitation of in situ resources to avoid the massive infrastructure of the

von Braun approach. Zubrin explicitly criticized the German-American.32 Inside

NASA, the Decadal Planning Team, as Goldin dubbed it, did consider whether

to skip the Moon and whether the now-ISS was a worthwhile investment. But

it was not until the crisis provoked by the Shuttle Columbia disaster in early

2003 that a new space policy could emerge under President George W. Bush.33

While it is too early to analyze this process in detail as the first historical work

is only now being done, what emerged as the Vision for Space Exploration

in 2004 was in some ways the anti-SEI. Big budget increases and any global

money numbers that might be politically toxic were to be avoided; the Shuttle

and Station were de facto rejected. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board

had already recommended phase-out of the Shuttle as dangerous; the gigantic

cost overruns and lengthy delays of the ISS had left a bad taste in everyone’s

mouth. One way of financing a new human space program on the cheap was

to try to get out of those two obligations as soon as possible. However, the

international dimensions and sunk cost of the ISS made it impossible for the

United States to get out of the Shuttle quickly or abandon the Station entirely,

and sending humans to Mars was simply impractical based on existing tech-

nology—targets closer to home were needed to test the new spacecraft and

habitation modules. Under the new Administrator, Mike Griffin, the Explorations

Systems Architecture Study in 2005 brought the Moon back to the fore as the

next critical objective; Mars quickly began fading into the background.34

Do all these developments mean that the von Braun paradigm is dead or

has little influence any longer? How one answers that question depends a great

32. Foralaterversion,seeRobertZubrin,The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must(NewYork,NY:Touchstone,1997),pp.47,66.

33. IamindebtedtoGlenAsnerandStephenGarber,formerandcurrenthistoriansatNASA,respectively,forlendingmedraftsofchaptersfromtheirforthcominghistoryoftheDecadalPlanningTeamandVisionforSpaceExploration.WhatIknowofthishistorydependsheavilyonthem.ForBush’sspacepolicystatement,seeNSPD31,14January2004,file12886,NASAHistoricalReferenceCollection,NASAHistoryDivision,NASAHeadquarters,Washington,DC,virtuallytheonlyprimarydocumentavailableinthesefilesasofOctober2008.

34. Exploration Systems Architecture Study: Final Report(Washington,DC:NASATM-2005-214062,2005),chap.1,electroniccopycourtesyofGlenAsnerandStephenGarber.

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deal on how one defines the term, which is slippery when one gets past the

fundamentals of a massive human spaceflight infrastructure and shuttle → station

→ Moon → Mars. If we have already built the Space Shuttle and International

Space Station, does it matter if we dump them as long as we follow the alleg-

edly logical order of the four steps? Von Braun would never have expected the

first two to be abandoned, seeing them as necessary infrastructure for human

spaceflight, but then he did not link the steps rigidly either—at least in the case

of the Station, which might or might not serve as an orbital base for construction

of interplanetary ships. What one can say is that the paradigm has weakened

as an entrenched mindset in the NASA human spaceflight establishment; the

disillusionment with the reusable space plane is the most visible sign of that.

But not all aspects of the paradigm are dead. Even though I am a Moon buff,

having grown up in the 1960s, and think there is much interesting science

to be done there, its lingering influence is certainly one possible explanation

for NASA’s commitment to building a big lunar base, which will likely not be

built because it would become another giant money sink like the ISS. And

why the determined resistance to discussing the proposals of Bob Farquhar

and others for asteroid missions instead, especially in view of our long-term

need to build a planetary defense? But here I have strayed from the role of

historian into that of commentator, as these events are too recent to provide

the historical perspective and research needed to judge them.

In conclusion, I would agree that Dwayne Day’s thesis of a von Braun

paradigm consisting of four main elements remains a plausible interpretative

device for analyzing a half century of U.S. human spaceflight planning, espe-

cially up to 1989. However, a distinction must be made between von Braun

and the paradigm, although he was the one who created it in Collier’s and

Disney. As we have seen, it by no means represented all the dimensions of his

enthusiasms, thoughts, and actions.

As for the paradigm he launched, it appears to have flourished in NASA

because it offered an alluring vision of the future for human spaceflight enthu-

siasts and a program of action for engineers and planners that was “logical”

yet malleable in its details. Its continuing influence was perhaps aided by the

discovery of Venus’s inaccessibility, which did nothing to disturb a Western

and American cultural obsession with Mars as a possible abode of life. The Red

Planet also appeared to be the only habitable, Earth-like objective anywhere

in the neighborhood, even as robotic scientific discoveries showed it to be less

appealing than hoped. The availability of the Moon relatively close by, and the

focus on colonizing planetary surfaces, also tended to reinforce the paradigm

while marginalizing other possible destinations like the libration points and

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the asteroids, not to mention the possibility of rejecting human spaceflight

altogether to concentrate on robotic exploration. There are certainly other

factors—social, cultural, and professional—that shaped the thinking of NASA

engineers and space planners. It could well pay space historians and policy

analysts to further test this thesis, as such investigations can cast new light

on the fundamental assumptions behind the human spaceflight enterprise in

the United States.

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